Lies and Weddings(123)
Eden gazed tenderly into his eyes. “Oh, Rufus, I wish you could have been there with me! You could have properly examined everything in that folder. You’d make better sense of it all than me. I was so shocked, I didn’t know what to think. Has my father been lying to me my entire life, or could your mum have had those documents faked?”
“I wouldn’t put it past her. She’s so desperate right now, she’d do practically anything. I bet you Rosina helped her cook up this story. Your real mother was Miss Hong Kong, and your real father was Thomas’s brother…who was murdered by your uncle? It’s all so far-fetched!”
“And yet…it’s as though I’ve found a few pieces of a very large puzzle that I’ve been trying to construct my whole life, and some of these pieces actually fit. My mother…in every dream I’ve ever had of her she’s appeared in some fantastical ball gown. I always thought it was just my childish fantasies, but I suddenly have these flashes of memories…seeing footage from beauty pageants. I think my mother used to watch videos of her pageants when I was very young. Was she really Miss Hong Kong? Why would Dad hide this from me all these years?”
“Why don’t you just ask him?” Rufus suggested.
Eden looked at him hesitantly. “I suppose we could…”
“Call him right now. You’ve always had such a marvelously open relationship with your father; nothing’s changed about that. So ask him point-blank. Pull the bandage off right now.”
“Pull the bandage off,” Eden repeated as she took a deep breath and grabbed her phone. Her father’s line rang for a few minutes and then went to voicemail.
“I guess he’s with a patient,” Eden said, slightly relieved he hadn’t picked up.
“Text him,” Rufus suggested.
“I have no clue where to begin…what should I ask?” Eden fretted.
“Just ask him what’s on your mind.”
Eden tapped on the text icon and noticed that there was already a text waiting for her from her father. Scanning it, she gasped out loud.
“What happened?” Rufus asked in concern. Eden handed him her phone, and on the screen was a text from her father:
Thomas Tong: Flying to LA again. Luis Felipe overdosed at a music festival. He’s in a coma. Please keep confidential.
III
CEDARS-SINAI MEDICAL CENTER
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA ? THE NEXT DAY
“After I stopped tripping, I got up from the bearskin rug and noticed that his face had turned blue. I shook him but couldn’t get him to wake up, so I called his bodyguard, who was just outside our tent.”—Rae Anne [last name redacted], beauty influencer
“I gave him Narcan and we did multiple rounds of resuscitation while we waited for the heli-evac. After nine or ten minutes of CPR, we managed to get his pulse back.”—Zvi, head of security for Rene Tan Enterprises, former Mossad agent
“We were midflight when his oxygen saturation began trending downward, leading us to intubate. He went into pulseless ventricular tachycardia (V-tach), so we shocked him to regain a pulse.”—Walter, paramedic from Ultra Concierge Emergency Heli-evac Services
“Upon the patient’s arrival, his CT head scan was negative for any signs of bleeding, but it was clear to us that he had a catastrophic anoxic brain injury due to oxygen deprivation.”—Kevin, attending physician at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles
“It’s the same sad story. We found fentanyl in his system, no doubt mixed into the cocaine. Every few weeks we get one of these rich kids OD’ing on coke laced with fentanyl. They think just because they’re paying top dollar it’s going to be safe, but these days with all the shit coming through Mexico and China, it’s like playing Russian roulette.”—Gina, Toxicology Unit, LAPD
“We were having so much fun. Machine Gun Kelly had just performed. We all went back to Luis Felipe’s amazing tent, which was decorated like a chalet in St. Moritz, and laid out on these giant white onyx trays was, like, an all-you-can-eat buffet of drugs. Like mounds of cocaine, crazy-expensive gummies, and pills and inhalants and injectables I never even knew existed. I actually only took a few edibles. I was fascinated by the packaging.”—Petra, graphic designer
Thomas hadn’t been able to sleep a wink throughout the twelve-hour flight to Los Angeles. He spent all his time ruminating on what more he could have done to help Luis Felipe and which top specialists he could call on now to help save his life. But all his hopes evaporated when he was shown into the Intensive Care Unit and set eyes on the patient in the bed, a breathing tube in his mouth and a tangled nest of other tubes and lines protruding from every limb, connecting him to the machines that were keeping him artificially alive. He knew at that moment that there wasn’t much that could be done for Luis Felipe Tan.
The lawyers Diego San Antonio y Viscaya and Jane Carlisle were already in the room, sitting somberly on metal chairs as they all gazed at the strangely sunken boy almost lost beneath machines.
The attending physician quickly brought Thomas up to speed. “Dr. Tong, we had two physicians do a brain stem reflex test. His reflexes have been nonresponsive and his brain function has been absent for almost twenty-four hours now. We have kept him on the ventilator as instructed, but we really could have pronounced him dead on arrival.”